Duty is a go, and how

I put together my own guild last week, having recognized something that I think many of my readers will understand...

People don't like wasting time.

Wasting time waiting to put a raid together... wasting time wiping... wasting time teaching new person after new person how to do the fights.

I'm fed up with it! You're fed up with it! So many people are fed up with it!

So what can be done?

Make rules. Lots of them.

Visit the website at dutyguild.blogspot.com and read the guild charter.

I sat down, weeks ago, to write that charter, intending to write a charter for a WotLK guild. Events in my previous guild, however, forced me to choose between two options - raid to fail, or get out and make something better.

I wish I could say the philosophy is simple... it's not. I've thought long and hard about this, working to address every little issue that crops up within guilds. Excessive, perhaps, but I'm a great believer in success by careful planning.

The major problem I wanted to address was the problem of personal accountability. It occurred to me, long ago, that the failure of Communism in Russia may have been caused by a lack of said virtue. Whether or not this is true, it planted the seed of an idea in my brain that's since grown to be a core tenet of my belief system.

Tenet: People perform drastically better when they are personally accountable for their actions.

But how to achieve personal accountability? Guilds get pretty big; how can one person keep track of dozens?

A lot of thought on this question led me to a conclusion which, in retrospect, was inevitable - one person can't.

Thus, the idea of Guild Groups was born.

Read the charter if you'd like to know more... Perhaps I'll write more on the subject some other time. For now, I'm tired.